Pain Management in Gaza

norwac

28 februar 2019

Ingen kommentarer

Pain Management in Gaza

NORWAC has started a new project in Gaza. The goal of the project is to improve the capacity for Pain Management, to ease the burden for the injured patients as well as utilizing the medicine the best way.

The extremely high number of severely injured people during the “Great March of Return”, which has been on-going since March 2018, have resulted in a large number of patients of various age groups suffering from different physical injuries.

Many of them have undergone critical limb reconstruction surgeries and limb-amputations. Post-operative pain level is suffered in various degrees. Many patients who need longer treatment time and care, are left without sufficient help due to lack of capacity, competence and a pain management multidisciplinary team. In addition, patients with chronic diseases are denied exit from Gaza to get appropriate health care service, which would reduce their levels of pain, especially oncology patients. Hence, there is an urgent need to intervene effectively to help these patients, and this can be achieved by training a local team in acute and chronic pain management. The governmental hospitals including Al-Shifa do not have a specialized centre or unit that deals with pain management. There are no pain management protocols, nor trained staff to treat patients suffering from acute and chronic pain.

NORWAC wanted to address this situation and started a Pain Management project in November 2018 as a result of extra funding from the MFA. The first health team visit took place in February 2019, when a team of Norwegian experts in pain management started the planning of this project in cooperation with the local team. The goal of the project is to improve the capacity for Pain Management, to ease the burden both for the injured patients as well as patients with chronic pain.